Booked for Murder (30 page)

Lindsay took a floppy disk out of her bag and slotted it into the computer, keying in instructions for it to copy the files in the personnel database. “I think that's the way it happened. She had a devious mind, did Penny. She'd have realized right away there was something seriously dodgy going on. Even if she didn't work it all out at the time, she learned enough to figure it out later.”

Sophie turned back to the filing cabinets and started pulling out the
files that corresponded to the list. For a few moments the only sound was the rattling of file drawers and the mechanical groans of the disk drive. Then Sophie said, “But how did Danny find out she knew what was going on?”

Lindsay took the floppy out of the drive and zipped it into the back pocket of her organizer. She shrugged. “I don't know for sure, but I think it went something like this. Penny, as Meredith found out to her cost, is a woman to whom honesty and integrity were paramount. The issue between her and Meredith splitting up wasn't infidelity, it was breach of trust. And Penny was ruthless, even though it cost her the woman she really loved. Agreed?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Sophie said. “She wasn't a forgiving woman. She was absolute for truth and it made her judgemental. It was the side of Penny I liked least. You think she confronted him with what she suspected?”

“I'd put money on it. Remember that curious incident the day before she died? When she came to Monarch supposedly for a meeting with Baz, only Baz was out having lunch with somebody else and Penny kicked off? It wasn't like Penny to stand on her dignity like that. I reckon she was engineering an opportunity to get Danny on his own. And knowing Penny, she probably laid it out for him over the starters.” Lindsay slipped into a Californian accent. “‘I know what you're doing here, Danny Boy. I know about the ghost jobs. I know so much about it, I'm going to put it at the heart of my next novel. And then people will ask where I got the idea from. They'll especially wonder if I change publishers at around the same time. Time you cleaned up your act, pal. Exorcise the ghosts or lose me.'”

Sophie looked wide-eyed at Lindsay, rocked by the accuracy of her impersonation. “Jesus! You gave me gooseflesh!”

Lindsay slid out of the chair and gave Sophie a hug. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you.”

Sophie smudged a kiss across the top of Lindsay's ear. “It was just a bit creepy. As if there aren't enough ghosts in here already,” she added with a nervous laugh, brandishing the files she'd extracted. “We should photocopy these, so we can take them to the police, right?”

“Wrong.”

The voice came from behind the door. Deep, tight and angry. The
two women swung round in time to see Danny King step out into the office. Lindsay's eyes swept over him, then swung irresistibly back to his right hand. Dull blue steel, just like in the movies. She didn't know what kind it was, but staring down the business end, the gun looked bigger than anything Clint Eastwood had ever relied on to make his day. The shock of it hurt her stomach and made her bladder burn. Years of journalism and messing with murder investigations had never taken her quite so close to her own mortality. It wasn't a place she liked. Instinctively, she moved closer to Sophie.

“Get away from each other,” Danny said. His cold control was almost more frightening than the black hole of the gun barrel. Without even considering the alternative, Lindsay obeyed, moving away from Sophie at the same moment as Sophie separated herself with a sidestep. That left Sophie in the inside corner of the L of the desks, with Lindsay a foot beyond the empty executive expanse that had stood between her and Danny.

Lindsay forced her eyes away from the gun to look at Danny's face. His expression was set, his jaw clenched so tight the muscles bunched under his ears. His creamy pale skin was flushed along the cheekbones, like two badly applied smears of a blusher designed for someone else's skin tones. His eyes glinted in the evening light like dark sapphires, hard and terrifying as the gun barrel. They carried about the same promise of compassion. “It's over, Danny,” Lindsay said.

“I don't hear no fat lady singing,” he grated contemptuously, his veneer of cultured civilization stripped away to reveal a savage gangster bent on survival. “You're the ones that are over.”

“Killing us doesn't solve anything. It's just two more bodies for the police to investigate. This racket of yours—how many lives is it worth? Sooner or later, the trail's going to lead back to your door,” Lindsay said defiantly, praying her voice wouldn't crack or her bladder give up.

Danny made a sound like a dog coughing. Lindsay translated it as a harsh laugh. “What fucking planet are you on? Do you have any idea of the people you've been messing with? This is not some cozy fucking TV series where the villain folds up in a heap and you get to be heroes. This is reality, and this is where you get to be dead.”

“There are people who know we were coming here tonight,” Sophie interjected, her voice low and calm. It didn't stop the sweat of fear running down Lindsay's armpits.

“I don't give a monkey's fuck if the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police knows you're here,” Danny said, taking a couple of steps forward. “The people I deal with, I don't have to give a toss about stuff like that. You don't understand a fucking thing, do you? Just like your stupid fucking friend Penny. She thought she could threaten me and my operation with her Goody Two Shoes mentality. None of you have the faintest idea of how the world works.” He ran his free hand over his sweating forehead. But the gun didn't even waver.

“How does the world work, Danny?” Sophie cut in, sounding as relaxed as a chat-show host asking him about his latest book.

“Money buys everything. Including love. And death. And it ain't love I'm offering tonight.”

Chapter 22

D
anny took another couple of steps closer to them, his eyes moving calmly from one to the other, making sure they knew he was watching them. “So what happens now?” Lindsay demanded.

“I make a phone call, we wait for a little while and then it's ‘Saturday night and I ain't got no body' time, ladies,” Danny said sarcastically. He reached into the hip pocket of his fashionably crumpled linen trousers and pulled out a slim mobile, flipped it open and keyed in a number with his thumb. It looked like it wasn't the first time he'd used the technique. Lindsay wondered if he made a habit of holding a gun on people while he phoned his friends. Was this how it had been for Penny, the gunpoint hostage, then the setting up of the scene for murder made to look like accident?

A moment for the phone to connect, then Danny spoke, never taking his eyes off them. “It's Danny. I've got a waste disposal problem at the office. Two loads. I want a team round, soon as . . . Yeah, it'll have to be moved before it can be dealt with . . . See you.” He closed the phone, a smile thin as a filleting knife slicing across his face. “Sorted,” he said contemptuously.

“Let's hope you make a better job of us than you did of Penny,” Lindsay said. In some strange way, hearing Danny transmit the order for her death had lifted the fear. It was inevitable now, there was nothing left to lose. It wouldn't take long for the hired guns to arrive
and once they were there she and Sophie were good as dead. If there was ever going to be any hope, it was now.

“Oh, I think that went off all right, actually,” he drawled, his urbanity restored now he was convinced everything was under control.

“The freak accident line didn't hold for long, did it?”

A quick, careless shrug of the eyebrows. “Accident, murder, what does it matter what the filth think? I could have had her shot or stabbed or strangled or battered to death. I know specialists, men who know what they're about. Professionals. But I thought, since it was costing me, I might as well get an earner out of it. So I took one of my boys along to her flat. She thought I'd come to talk terms. She never knew what hit her. But I had some great publicity for the new book. Which I figured she owed me, since I wasn't going to be getting any more books from her.” As he preened himself, his wariness was slowly receding, forced back by a tide of complacency. Lindsay wasn't the only one to notice it.

“It was a clever idea,” Sophie said. “Utilitarian.”

“I hate waste,” he said. “But I can't think of any way of making a shilling out of you two. Shame, really.”

“Another reason to avoid killing us,” Sophie said, still managing to sound as calm as a midsummer pond.

He snorted derisively. “Don't give me that bollocks. I told you, this isn't like the telly. You don't get to talk me out of it. You're going to die. If you're a Catholic, I'm sorry, you're going to have to manage without the last rites.”

“Without these files, we haven't got a shred of proof,” Sophie said. “The cops are never going to take us seriously. They'll realize Lindsay's a friend of Meredith, that she's grasping at straws to make it look like somebody else was responsible for Penny's death. All they're going to see is the money. Why would a millionaire publisher kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? Legitimate businessmen don't do things like that, not even ones who have a bit of a murky past.”

“You must think I'm a real punter if you think that bullshit cuts any ice,” Danny said, his eyes on Sophie. “Anyway, if you didn't get any joy with the cops, you're just as likely to shop me to the taxman. Which
is just as dangerous and probably more expensive in the long run.”

Sophie shrugged. “All you have to do is send out redundancy notices and close the racket down.” She inclined her head towards the chair behind her. “All right if I sit down? I've got a bad back, I can't stand for long. If I'm going to die, the least you can do is let me do it in comfort.”

Danny eyed Sophie suspiciously, then took a couple of steps forward to check there was no trick, nothing dangerous in reach once she was sitting at the desk. Lindsay instantly recognized the only opportunity she was likely to get. As he nodded and said, “Okay,” she gathered her strength in a crouch and launched herself through the air at Danny.

She was slower than she anticipated, muscles still suffering from being crushed against asphalt. Worse, Danny was faster than she'd thought possible. He swivelled on the balls of his feet, his gun arm straightening without a jerk, his finger squeezing the trigger. A flash, a boom, the smell of cordite and her shoulder felt like it had hit a brick wall at something approaching the land speed record. The impact spun her round in a half-circle, but her momentum carried her crashing forward in an unintended shoulder charge.

They collided and crashed to the floor, Lindsay realizing as she landed on top of him that only one of the screaming voices was hers. Beneath her, Danny gagged, trying to squeeze some air back into lungs that felt paralyzed. The gun barked once, twice as Lindsay lay on top of him, incapable of struggle, beyond even wrestling for the weapon.

When they went down, Sophie threw herself across the desk, screeching like an express train, then crouched, panting, trying to stay away from the lines of fire as Danny's gun arm thrashed pointlessly around. Her eyes raked the room for any kind of weapon. But nothing suggested itself as a potential cosh.

Necessity mothered invention. Like a crab, she scuttled round the desk and ripped cables out of the back of the computer monitor, not caring that her fingers throbbed from the violence of her actions. All she could think about was Lindsay and the grunts and sobs coming from behind her.

The monitor came free in seconds that felt like weeks. Sophie
slipped both forearms under it and lifted it clear of the desk. She turned to see Danny thrashing under Lindsay, his breath recovered. He was trying to free his gun arm enough to bring the barrel round to where he could blow a bloody tunnel through Lindsay's brain. She was incapable of stopping him, her body a dead weight leaking blood all over Danny's silk shirt and antique silk rug.

“Fuck you,” Sophie roared, standing over him. His panicked eyes rolled up in his head and he saw her standing there like a time-slipped Greek goddess of vengeance.

“No!” he yelled, his voice outraged, his face a mask of astonishment that anyone could have the upper hand over him.

Sophie dropped the monitor.

 

Sophie crouched over Lindsay, a 9mm Glock sticking out of the waistband of her jeans. She was packing the hole in Lindsay's shoulder with the rags of the silk shirt she'd ripped from Danny King's unconscious body. She'd checked him for vital signs once she'd made sure Lindsay wasn't bleeding from an artery. He was unconscious, though not deeply so. She'd ripped his office phone from the wall and used the cable to tie his hands and feet behind his back in a vicious ligature that would guarantee he came round with excruciating cramps. It was, she had decided, the very least he deserved.

It was a long time since she'd worked in a casualty department, and even then she'd only ever seen one gunshot wound. It was a failure of experience that worried her, leaving her uncertain as to how life-threatening Lindsay's injury might be. She could gauge something from the blood loss, but when it came to assessing the actual extent of the injury or the degree of shock involved in such a wound, Sophie reckoned she might as well be a riveter as a doctor. She avoided mentioning that to Lindsay, settling instead for telling her that she was going to be okay, that Sophie would get her out of here and to a hospital just as soon as she had stopped her bleeding to death. She knew that even
in extremis
, Lindsay would appreciate the drama of that expression.

Lindsay lay still, curiously aware of the texture of the short silk fibers of the rug against the skin of her uninjured hand and arm. She felt strangely distanced from her pain, being more conscious of the
shallowness of her breathing and the fat blobs of sweat running down her forehead and cheeks. The whole upper left quadrant of her body felt so strange, so alien, it might as well have belonged to someone else for all the connection she could make between it and her past experience. “I love you,” she said, aware of Sophie's hands moving over her body. It came out as a croak, but Sophie understood.